Ann Arbor, Michigan — home to the University of Michigan and approximately forty thousand people who think recycling is a personality trait — just voted unanimously to rip out more than 600 neighborhood watch signs from streets across the city. The reason? The signs were “expressions of exclusion” that encouraged racial profiling.

Yeah. The little yellow signs with the eyeball on them. The ones that have been on every street corner in America since your grandparents were alive. Those are racist now. Congratulations, Ann Arbor — you’ve out-liberaled San Francisco, and honestly, we didn’t think that was possible.

Mayor Christopher Taylor — who looks exactly like you’d imagine a mayor named Christopher Taylor from Ann Arbor would look — delivered the reasoning with a straight face. “Neighborhood watch signs are expressions of exclusion, and they’re inconsistent with our values,” Taylor said. He added that the town didn’t want to “push people away.”

Push people away from what, exactly? From… not getting robbed? From knowing that your neighbors are keeping an eye on things while you’re at work? We’re genuinely asking because we cannot figure out who is being “excluded” by a sign that says “We Watch Out for Each Other.”

(Oh wait — we know exactly who’s being “excluded.” Criminals. The signs exclude criminals. That’s literally the entire point.)

The city council voted unanimously on this back in December 2025, and the signs came down the following week. All 600-plus of them. And here’s the part that should make every taxpayer in Ann Arbor consider moving to a state where the adults are still in charge: it cost $18,000 to dispose of the signs.

Eighteen. Thousand. Dollars.

To throw away crime prevention signs.

We want to be very clear about what happened here. A city government looked at a program designed to help neighbors protect each other from burglaries, car break-ins, and home invasions — a program that costs essentially nothing to maintain — and said, “You know what? This makes us uncomfortable. Better spend eighteen grand ripping it all out.”

That’s not governance. That’s therapy. And we’re paying for it.

The justification, naturally, is that neighborhood watch programs “encourage racial profiling.” This is the same argument the Left has used to dismantle every effective crime prevention tool in America. Broken windows policing? Racial profiling. Stop and frisk? Racial profiling. Security cameras in high-crime areas? You guessed it — racial profiling. Now a yellow sign on a telephone pole is doing racial profiling. The sign doesn’t even have arms.

What Ann Arbor’s city council is really saying — and they’ll never admit this out loud — is that they believe their own residents are too racist to watch their own neighborhoods without targeting minorities. Think about that for a second. The elected leaders of this town just told every homeowner in Ann Arbor: “We don’t trust you to look out your window without being a bigot.”

What a lovely thing to say to the people who elected you.

And naturally, nobody on the council asked the residents whether they wanted the signs removed. It was unanimous — not a single dissenting vote. In a town of over 120,000 people, not one council member said, “Hey, maybe we should ask the folks who actually live on these streets if they feel safer with the signs up?” Nope. The progressive brain trust decided the signs were problematic, and down they came.

Meanwhile — and we feel compelled to mention this — Ann Arbor’s property crime rate has been climbing steadily for the past three years. Car thefts are up. Package theft is through the roof (thanks, Amazon). And the city’s solution to rising crime is… removing the signs that remind would-be criminals that someone might be watching.

Brilliant strategy. Truly the best minds of a generation at work.

You know what’s wild? Neighborhood watch programs were started in the 1970s because communities wanted to take responsibility for their own safety. Regular people — not cops, not government — just neighbors looking out for each other. It’s about as grassroots and community-oriented as it gets. And the Left killed it because the word “watch” apparently triggers them now.

We’d suggest that the residents of Ann Arbor start their own unofficial neighborhood watch — you know, just neighbors texting each other when something sketchy happens on the block. But honestly, in that town, somebody would probably report the group chat to the DEI office.

Here’s our prediction: within a year, Ann Arbor’s crime stats are going to tick up in the neighborhoods where those signs used to be. And when they do, the city council will blame poverty, or systemic racism, or climate change, or literally anything other than the fact that they spent $18,000 to tell criminals the coast is clear.

But hey — at least nobody’s feelings were hurt by a picture of an eyeball on a sign. And really, isn’t that what good governance is all about?